


a black evening

by nasa



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Presumed Dead, nobody is permanently dead i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 12:01:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15096287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasa/pseuds/nasa
Summary: “Tony,” Natasha interrupts gently, despite the tears welling in her eyes. “Steve is dead.”





	a black evening

Steve’s mission is running a day long when someone finally overrides the locks on the workshop and comes in.

“It’s about time,” Tony says lightly, despite the swooping joy in his chest. Steve should never be gone so long; it was only three weeks this time, but even with the little notes and reminders Steve leaves around for Tony, it’s tough.

He wipes his hand on his rags, replacing his wrench on the table as he turns to the door. “I was starting to worry - oh, hey, Natasha.”

His heart sinks a little bit, but he forces a smile on his face anyway. Nat’s in civvies, and is accompanied by Thor, who’s wearing full battle armor and his usual cape. They approach him slowly; it doesn’t take Tony long to realize something’s wrong, what with the expressions on their faces, the way they move almost delicately, like he’s a cat they’re afraid to startle.

“What’s wrong?” Tony demands, heart rate spiking. “Did something happen?”

Thor swallows hard. “I am so sorry,” he says, and Tony’s heart, if anything, plummets farther in his chest.

“Don’t be sorry, why are you sorry, there’s no reason to be sorry.” Tony whirls to Natasha, questioning. “Nat?”

“Tony,” Natasha says carefully, “Something happened on the mission. Something - something went wrong.”

“Steve?” Tony asks immediately. “Is he hurt, where is he, how bad -“

“Tony,” Natasha interrupts gently, despite the tears welling in her eyes. “Steve is dead.”

The words take a long moment to process. Steve is dead. Steve is dead. What can that possibly mean? It must be a code or something, some colloquialism. Because it can’t mean what Tony thinks it means, it can’t -

“No,” Tony says, shaking his head. He stumbles backward, away from Natasha’s painfully understanding gaze, Thor’s sad eyes. “No, he’s - no, stop it, why would you say that?”

“Tony,” Natasha says gently, but Tony just shakes his head. His body feels numb, unsteady, untethered.

“You’re wrong,” Tony says, with all the conviction he can muster. “You’re wrong, he’s - he’s Steve, he’s not dead. He can’t be.”

“Shield brother,” Thor says, voice deep and gravelly and pained, god, oh god, this is real, isn’t it? Tony’s knees shake and his stumbles, manages to catch the edge of a countertop. He braces himself, leans all his weight on it, just trying to stay upright.

“We were supposed to grow old together,” he whispers, voice hoarse like he’s been sobbing for hours. “We - oh, god.”

And then there are hands on his shoulders - one small and delicate, another big and heavy, both of them firm. In a daze, Tony lets the hands pull and prod him, until he blinks and finds he’s been moved to the couch, sitting with his hands in his lap.

“Call Rhodey,” Natasha says, as she takes a seat next to Tony. “And Pepper. Hey, Tony? Tony, can you look at me?”

But Tony can’t move, isn’t even sure if he can breathe. Steve is dead. Steve is dead. Steve is dead.

Steve will never call Tony again. He’ll never hug him again, never kiss him again. Tony will never again see him smile, will never again see him laugh, will never get to feel his warm hands on his back after a long day, fingers knotting through Tony’s hair, the unique tenor of his voice when he says  _I love you._ Steve doesn’t love anyone. Steve is dead.

Tony feels like someone has taken a razor to his heart, like the shrapnel is back in his chest and is clawing him to pieces. Someone is sobbing, he thinks, and he thinks it might be him.

The world fades away. All that is left is this couch, and the quiet emptiness of the workshop, and Tony’s soul slowly shredding to pieces.

Steve is dead. Tony closes his eyes and hopes to die, too.

-

He wakes up on the workshop couch some hours later.

The room is dark, and quiet. A few blue screens are lit up in the corner; in front of them, Clint stands, head bowed, murmuring to someone quietly on the phone. On the floor beside the couch, Thor sits, sleeping, his head tilted back to rest on the couch cushion.

Tony closes his eyes and tries not to think. He feels hazy, slow, like he’s been drugged. Probably a relaxant, he thinks. He can’t remember falling asleep, can’t remember anything but Natasha and Thor showing up in his lab, the horrible news, the swooping feeling in his gut, and -

He sees it. In front of him, directly in his line of sight, is Steve’s drawer in Tony’s workshop. It’s filled with colored pencils and sharpeners and thick pads of paper half-filled with gorgeous sketches. On the outside of the drawer is a sticky note.  _Hey, sweetheart,_ it says.  _Miss you. See you soon._ It’s accompanied by a cartoon Steve, holding a heart out to the viewer.

Tony’s eyes burn. He hasn’t seen that one, yet. Steve must have left it for Tony before he went on the mission. Steve left it for Tony, and it’s the last note he’ll ever leave for Tony.

Without thinking, Tony staggers to his feet. The movement alerts Clint, because he whirls, muttering something quickly into his phone before tossing it down on one of the workshop counters.

“Hey, man,” he says, “Sit down, what are you -“

Tony manages to stumble to the drawer before Clint catches him around the shoulders. “Buddy,” Clint says quietly, just as Tony drops to his knees, reaching out with shaking fingers to pluck the post it from the cabinet.

Up close Tony can see an additional message in tiny print at the bottom:  _p.s. I love you ;)_

_He loves that goddamn winky face,_ Tony thinks absurdly. Something sharp stabs Tony in the chest when he realizes that he should be thinking in past tense. Steve is past tense. Steve is dead.

Tony doesn’t fight Clint when he hauls him to his feet and guides him back onto the couch. Thor has woken up, and is rubbing sleep from his eyes, moving to sit beside Tony on the ratty workshop sofa.

“Rhodey is coming,” Clint tells Tony as he sags back onto the cushions. Tony is barely listening, focusing all his attention on the little sticky note.  _Miss you. See you soon._ He almost rubs his thumb over the pencil, but stops himself at the last second; he wouldn’t want it to smear. Can’t allow it to smear. “So is Pepper.”

Tony doesn’t want Rhodey or Pepper, he wants Steve. He almost says as much, but he can’t quite make himself open his mouth. His entire body feels like it’s made of metal, like his bones have been replaced with molten iron, something far too heavy to move.

“Natasha went back to the crash site,” Clint continues when Tony doesn’t say anything else. “To - to try to bring him back.”

_To bring him back._ To recover his body. Because that’s all what’s left of Steve, now - a body, an empty shell of slowly rotting cells and growing colonies of bacteria and nothing left of the Steve that Tony knew and loved.

“I want to be alone,” Tony manages after a long moment. His words slur, but he doesn’t care; he just wants them out, so maybe he can get a bottle of vodka or pills or a fucking blowtorch for all he cares, and maybe stop thinking about this for just a little bit.

“I can leave,” Clint says quietly, “Or Thor can. But not both of us.”

Tony presses his eyes shut. He almost wants to laugh. “What do you think I’m going to do?”

“I’m not sure I want to find out.”

Tony considers that for a moment, trying to breathe. “You get out,” he says finally, “Or I call the suit.”

“Tony,” Thor says. Maybe he’s aiming for stern, but it just comes out sad.

“I call all the suits,” Tony revises. “Or I just call one, and I have to take me the hell away from here.”

He forces his eyes open so he can glare at Clint and Thor in turns. “This is my goddamn house,” he says. “Now get the  _hell_ out of my space.”

There is a long silence where Tony isn’t sure if they’ll comply. But then Clint sighs, sagging like a cloth doll, and Thor rises from the couch to join him.

“Let us know if you need anything,” Clint says. “We’re here for you, you know. You’re not alone.”

What an absurd statement. Of course Tony is alone. His husband is dead.

But he knows saying as much would cross the line from hurt to cruel, and so he keeps his mouth shut as, in the periphery of his vision, Clint and Thor back away and fade.

“Jarvis, lock the doors,” he says once they’re gone. “Blackout mode.”

“Of course, sir,” Jarvis says quietly, and the glass wall of Tony’s workshop goes dark.

There are overrides to blackout mode, of course, but Steve is the only one who knows them. It’s so funny - Tony hadn’t even considered his death as a possibility when he was putting the safety protocols of the Tower into place. Of course Steve would live. Of course nothing could ever happen to him.

Tony considers getting a drink. It’d be so easy - it’s not like he doesn’t have a secret stash hidden away from Steve, after all, even if he hasn’t had to dip into it in years - but every time he thinks about it he thinks of the look on Steve’s face, the last time Tony had gotten truly wasted. It was years ago, before Tony and Steve even started dating, but it was something Tony would never forget. That disappointment _._

So Tony doesn’t go for the vodka. Instead, he curls up in a ball on the sofa, post-it-note in hand, and closes his eyes.

-

The next time he wakes, it is bright and loud in the lab.

Whatever relaxants Bruce had given him have faded, by now, and he no longer feels slow and incapable of movement. Instead, in his bones there is a buzzing fury, an anger unlike anything he’s ever experienced before. And behind it, an earth-shattering loss.

“Tony,” someone says, as Tony forces his eyes open in the light. “Tony, come here.”

It’s Natasha. Tony wonders when she got back; Thor had said she’d gone back. Hadn’t she?

“Fuck off,” he spits, curling away from her outstretched hand. “Jesus, how did you even get in here? Did Jarvis let you in?”

The post-it note is still in his hands, a bit crumpled from how he had held it when he was sleeping. He smoothes it out with shaking fingers.

“Tony,” Natasha says, more demanding this time, “Trust me, you want to come with me.”

“Make me,” Tony challenges. Natasha only spares him a second glance before she reaches out, snagging him by his ear, and lifts him straight off the couch.

“Ow, ow,  _fuck,”_ Tony hisses, but she’s got a grip like a vise, and he has no choice but to let her drag him out of the lab and up the stairs.

“Fuck,  _stop_ it,” Tony hisses, finally yanking himself away from Natasha when they reach the common living room. He rubs at his ear as he glares at her. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

She’s opening her mouth to reply when someone else speaks. “Tony?” they say from behind him, and Tony’s heart almost drops to his shoes.

“Please don’t say I’m hallucinating,” he croaks, afraid to turn around in case he is. He doesn’t want to see air where Steve’s voice is coming from, doesn’t want to -

But Natasha just shakes her head, a smile curling around the corners of her lips. “Not unless it’s a collective hallucination,” she says, and Tony is already choking on a sob when he turns.

It’s - Steve. Steve, alive. Steve, not dead.  _Steve is not dead._ He’s sitting on one of the stools in the kitchen as Sam pokes at a wound on his hand, but he rises from his chair as Tony watches, taking a step forward. He’s holding one arm at a strange angle, and there’s a bandage around his thigh, and a nasty cut on his forehead, and he’s here. He’s not dead.

“Steve,” Tony chokes out, stumbling forward. Steve reaches out for him and Tony falls forward, letting Steve catch him and hold him up like he always does.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Steve murmurs as Tony tucks his face into Steve’s neck, breathing in shuddering gasps. “Shh, I’m right here, you’re okay.”

“You - they said you were dead,” Tony chokes out. He fists his hands in Steve’s shirt as his vision rapidly fills with tears, worried that if he can’t see Steve clearly, he’ll somehow disappear. “You - you -“

“I’m fine,” Steve promises, pressing kisses to the top of Tony’s head, his temple, his ear. “Just a little banged up.”

It’s Steve, all right. There’s no one else it could be. Tony would know him anywhere, would know him blind and deaf and in alternate universes, and this is him, this is  _his_  Steve. He smells like himself, like sweat and oil and coconut, and he’s warm like he’s supposed to be, solid. Tony’s grip on reality, personified in a human being.

Tony is almost worried he’s holding onto Steve too tight, enough that it’ll bruise, but he can’t make himself let go. “How?” he chokes out. Steve’s hands slip from Tony’s waist up to his back, stroking soothingly up and down his spine.

“There was an explosion,” Steve says, the calm tenor of his voice softening it’s content. “I got thrown clear. Didn’t wake up for a while.”

“But you’re -“

“I’m okay,” Steve promises, pulling Tony a little closer to him. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m just fine, honey, I’m right here.”

“You have a fractured arm and a head wound that needs to be looked at,” Sam pipes up from behind Steve, and Steve huffs, but it makes Tony pull back, just the smallest bit.

“Have you been to medical?” he sniffs. God, he’s a wreck, all snotty and ugly, but Steve has seen him worse. Probably. Maybe. And honestly, either way, he doesn’t care. Steve could think he was disgusting and hate him, for all he cared, as long as he was alive.

“I was on my way,” Steve says, and Tony doesn’t even call him out on how that’s obviously a lie. God.  _God._ Steve is here, and he’s alive, and Tony honestly doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“Let’s go to medical, then,” he says, but still doesn’t move away from Steve. He’s not sure he can let him go just yet, not even that little bit.

But Steve is perfect and lovely and wonderful, and so he just cups Tony’s face in both his big, warm hands, bringing their foreheads together. “I’m right here, honey,” he says, breath ghosting over Tony’s lips. “Okay? I’m here and I’m fine and I’m with you.”

Tony nods, fighting tears. He leans forward to steal a kiss from Steve, and then another. “Okay,” he rasps, and finally steps back the smallest bit so Steve can walk.

He stays pressed close to his side, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, hands intertwined.

As they head to the elevator, Tony catches Natasha’s eye. She’s smiling, full-fledged now, an expression he rarely sees on her.

Tony tightens his grip on Steve’s hand, presses a kiss to his shoulder. Steve’s here. Steve’s not dead. Everything is going to be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at nasafic.tumblr.com
> 
> let me know if i forgot to tag anything important!


End file.
